What are some good text editors that can write in Sinhalese?

[sujeewa]

I have been using Linux for a while now. These days my primary (and only) operating system is Fedora Workstation 36. Here to write in Sinhalese I use Sinhala (singlish (m17n)).

I have no issue using this method to write Sinhala characters in web pages and some applications. But in some text editors there are issues. I tried these,

• Emacs

• Gnome Text Editor

• vim

If you know any good text editors that support writing in Sinhala feel free to write a reply.
Better if it's light weight.
Thanks you!

[kamal]

I am on Ubuntu and use SiWriter, an IBus extension that I wrote many years ago. I face a key repetition problem on Google Chrome for some characters. Otherwise it has been serving well. As the browser I generally use FireFox and it works well with SiWriter. I am not however sure if it works well on terminal applications like vim. Due to poor rendering of Sinhala on terminal, I haven't tried Sinhala input on terminal applications a lot. Neither I haven't looked into why the rendering is poor on the terminal. That's however a different problem not related to the input method.

Anyway, I am not sure why gedit doesn't work for you. Do you see characters getting rendered without an issue if you copy paste into gedit? If so, the problem might be with the input method itself. So I wonder if you should look for another text editor or try to fix the input method problems that may exist.

I am not sure about the singlish (m17n) input approach. I haven't used it. You can feel the SiWriter approach by using the web tool at https://demo.software.lk/siwriter/ . Is singlish input approach different from it?

[sujeewa]

Thank you for the quick response!

I tried gedit. Sinhala works perfectly on it. Apparently the latest Gnome version replaced gedit with a new application called "Gnome text editor" which is not as good as gedit.

SiWriter looks kind of similar to singlish, but a little different. For example to write මම in SiWriter I will have to type 'mm' but in Singlish it is 'mama'.
If I wanted to write 'මාමා' in SiWriter it's 'mama'. But in Singlish it's 'maamaa'.

I find singlish a little more natural, probably because I am used it. Anyway thank you!